Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller

“Science fiction, which once frightened because it seemed so far-out, now frightens because it seems so near. The Andromeda Strain is as matter-of-fact as the skull-and-crossbones instructions on a bottle of poison—and just as chillingly effective”

The decades following World War II saw an unprecedented increase in the
scale and scope of science. These developments generated new dreams as
well as new nightmares about the potential for science to reshape the
order of things. These changes also gave birth to science studies, a
discipline that emerged to understand how political power and social
life was reconfigured by “big science” and vice versa.2 One of the
most prolific and influential interpreters of these changes is a writer
whose oeuvre is often dismissed as too big, too bestselling, too
popular, to warrant sustained attention by either science or science
studies: Michael Crichton. Yet he is heir to a literary tradition that
includes H.G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle, all of
whom profoundly shaped ideas about science as well as its practice by
inhabiting spaces of ambiguity between the possible and the actual.

Crichton, born in 1942 in Chicago and raised in Roslyn, NY, himself grew
big—as an adult he measured 6 foot 9 inches—along with American science.
But even when he was small, Crichton was an apt pupil of these earlier
authors’ literary practices. Beginning in the 1960s, he adapted them for
the primary arenas of late 20thp century mainstream American culture—a
media environment inhabited by blockbuster novels, film, and prime time
TV. His body of work, which includes major contributions to each of
those genres, is a rich and deep archive for exploring the production
and circulation of the fears and fantasies that swirl around and often
suffuse science. It is similarly valuable for understanding the
emergence and maturation of science studies.

A huge part of the appeal of Crichton’s work has been its intimate and
subversive relationship to science “fact.” I am tentative about the word
here because it is one that science studies scholars have been
interrogating for about as long as Crichton has been writing. Indeed,
the form and tone of Crichton’s stories track closely to shifts in
academic science studies: he recreates the world in which scientists
work, devoting specific attention to the practices, instruments, and
values that animate their knowledge production enterprise. These are
worlds of compromise, impurity, and commercial and political
imperatives. They are worlds of uncertainty, breakdown, and human error.
Most of all, they are worlds in which knowledge is up for grabs.
Crichton’s stories are philosophical and polemical, asking time and
again how it is that humans who struggle understand each other in the
most banal ways can be so confident in their ability to master nature.

Crichton at his desk during his time at Harvard Medical School.
His 1969 “Edgar” award for A Case of Need sits nearby. (Julian Brown
for The Boston Globe / 1969 file [source].

Becoming a writer was, he said in his 1988
autobiography, “his
earliest life ambition.” It took him a while, however, to embrace it as
his professional identity.

Though he enrolled at Harvard as an English major, when he got a B- on a
paper (which Crichton claimed was written by George Orwell but submitted
as his own work as a jab at his Professor), he switched to anthropology
and studied with William White Howells. Howells was
celebrated
for his scholarship on craniometry as well as for the trade books he
wrote about human origins, with titles like Mankind So Far.3 Before
abandoning academia for medicine—he received an MD from Harvard, as
well—Crichton taught introduction to anthropology at Cambridge and
published scholarly articles based on researching using skulls stored at
the British Museum in London, England.4

During this time, he financed his education by writing pulpy
mysteries under the pseudonym John Lange. He wrote the book, A Case of Need
(1968)—a thinly veiled critique of Harvard Medical School—under the pen
name Jeffrey Hudson.

Under his own name Crichton soon established his beat as a reporter of
the near future, the possible but not yet actual. In doing so, he
connected with heterogeneous reading publics who had come to accept the
ubiquity of what science studies scholars now refer to as
“technoscience” in everyday life but who did not often possess the same
kind of privileged access to the circumstances of its production.5

Crichton honed his literary voice by blending conventions from his own
clinical observations, the dialogue-heavy New Journalism that was taking
hold via authors like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, and the gothic fiction
of a century prior. He became celebrated for his ability to combine
meticulous attention to authenticating detail about the practices and
procedures that characterized professional work as well as the
middle-class dreams that made that work seem meaningful, with more
sensational speculation about how science could go horribly wrong. His
first major science fiction publication was the biomedical thriller,
The Andromeda Strain
(1969), which he wrote while in medical school. Soon after director
Robert Wise made the novel into a
movie (1971), a combination that
proved to be archetypal of the niche Crichton would occupy and exploit
in decades to come.

The Andromeda Strain was a story of biological crisis—the introduction
of a mysterious and deadly viral agent upon the return of a space
voyage—at a time when many were still fixated on the threat of nuclear
crises. In the novel, a military satellite returns to earth, landing in
northern Arizona. The team sent to recover the satellite breaks radio
contact. Because the military suspects an infection, they dispatch a new
team of scientists to investigate, only to find that everybody in the
nearest small town is dead (except for an old man and a screaming
infant). The survivors are taken to an underground laboratory where the
organism, named the “Andromeda Strain” is identified and nearly kills
all of mankind.

Published weeks before the lunar landing of Apollo
11,
The Andromeda Strain played on the fear that astronauts would bring
new germs back to earth. Crichton subsequently attributed the idea for
the plot to the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. While studying
anthropology at Harvard, Howells tasked Crichton with reporting on
Simpson’s (1953) The Major Features of Evolution.6 He recalled
being struck by a footnote, where the famed evolutionary theorist
disparagingly observed that microbes in the upper atmosphere had never
been used as the subject of a science fiction story. Simpson had, at the
time, been embroiled in debates with Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg
over the subject of exobiology.7

Legendary editor Bob Gottlieb (he “discovered” Joseph Heller and
published Catch-22) also saw potential in such a story and guided the
book to publication at Knopf. He encouraged Crichton to write the novel
in the style of a New Yorker profile,
aiming for a cool, detached voice that towed the line between fiction
and reality. In the novel, Crichton highlighted then new technologies
like remote surveillance, voice activated systems, computer imaging and
diagnosis, handprint identification, and biosafety procedures. The
hazmat suit, which is now commonplace visual signifier of
biocontamination, made its public debut in the film, as did Crichton,
who appeared in a small role. His depiction of cutting-edge innovations
made it difficult for readers to disentangle the actual from the merely
possible—heightening the thrill. The plausibility of his account was
meant to leave people in a perpetual state of suspense, a nightmare-like
trance that might not be that different from being awake.

In the years the followed, both the phrase and the concept of an
“Andromeda strain”
became linked with emerging infectious diseases including AIDS, Marburg,
and Ebola, appearing both in news coverage of epidemics as well as in
biomedical publications and political speech. Crichton was not then comfortable positioning himself as a commentator on these new diseases, though he
later acknowledged that the novel was one of the first popular works to
suggest that biological science was growing and that it might supplant
physics and nuclear power as a source of controversy and curiosity.

Initially, Crichton insisted that his work was about science, not
politics—as though they could be separated. Nevertheless, in 1969, as
the Cold War was at its peak, the Russian edition of The Andromeda
Strain was reviewed as radical, left-wing, anti-American, and
anti-military. The same book was, at home, reviewed as a right wing,
elite, hand-maiden to the military. Some charged that his depiction of a
viral threat might inspire the creation of bioweapons. This
heterogeneous yet charged reception of his work established Crichton as
a lightening rod for political controversy.8

The runaway success of The Andromeda Strain encouraged Crichton to
abandon his medical career—about which he was already deeply
ambivalent—and to invest fully in the literary genre that became
synonymous with his name: the “technothriller.” Along with authors like
John Grisham and Tom Clancy, the technothriller is part of a
genealogy that includes Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), Richard Condon’s Manchurian Candidate (1959), and Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail Safe (1962)—all of which subsequently became movies. Crichton’s work in this genre includes more than a dozen best-selling novels, multiple blockbuster films, video games, and the award-winning medical drama, ER.

Much like his peers in science studies, Crichton’s primary sources were
scientific books and journals . . . which he cited in reference sections
at the backs of his novels. He was also an adept interviewer and did not
hesitate to use his connections to institutions like Harvard and the
Salk Institute, where he worked for a year as a
post-doc while writing Andromeda Strain. (Sociologists Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar arrived a
decade later.) Crichton imbued this robust base of technical detail with
a prophetic sense of impending disaster. Why did scientists choose to
focus on these details and not others? How would their inscriptions
travel in the wider world? What might go wrong? What already had?

Crichton died of liver cancer in 2008 but books continue to be released
in his name. Take, for example
Micro (2011), a
manuscript that was completed by Richard Preston. (Micro followed
Crichton’s tried and true of convention of team of experts confronting
science gone amok. This time, the team got a new stock figure: the
anthropologist of science. A citation to Latour in the novel’s
bibliography suggests Crichton’s fiction continued to keep pace with the
anthropological turn in science studies.) In the wake of the most recent
Ebola epidemic, Preston’s own non-fiction Ebola thriller The Hot Zone (1994) returned to the
best-seller list. Despite criticisms from the world of public health
that Preston was sensationalist, others, including the New Yorker,
embraced Preston as a leading expert on the potential impact of the
disease, publishing his dispatches from Sierra Leone under a title, “The
Ebola Wars,” that was a throwback to Andromeda Strain.

It is possible to quantify Crichton’s influence in terms of dollars—in
the hundreds of millions. But it is a more challenging and rewarding
task to reckon with the ways in which his speculative writings and their
filmic depictions have shaped the ways policy makers, students, and even
scientists themselves, have conceived of what is thrilling—both sublime
and grotesque—about emerging technoscience.

Tracing the life histories of Crichton’s big science fiction stories
gives credence to the suggestion that science fiction colonizes the
future; that a subset of those who write it and who read it resolve and
actively redefine the boundary between fantasy and reality.9 What we
need to understand this phenomenon, to understand the history of
technoscience, are biographies of science fiction authors and, perhaps
more urgently, biographies of the products of their creative endeavors.
Among the themes that recur in Crichton’s works are ideas about the
relationship between machine and nature, science and capitalism, wonder
and fear, fraud and corruption, humility and hubris. These are the
dreams and nightmares our science is made of—as well as our history and
anthropology of science. It’s time to wake up to the reality of Michael
Crichton’s fiction.